Can't open project after Pro license expired

I stupidly purchased a pro subscription last year (or the year before, time is weird right now...) which it turns out I did not actually need: I make less than the revenue threshold ($0) and there are no additional features of Pro that I needed or used.

I spent a bunch of time working on a project. Took a break for the past several months during which my Pro license expired.

Thinking I want to get back into it, so I fire up Unity and it seems to have downgraded to a Personal license. No big deal, I think, I didn't use any Pro features.

However, when I try to open the project, the hub disappears for a second, the splash screen of the editor shows up, then disappears and the Hub reappears with a message shown for a brief second (I had to record the screen to see it): "Unity is already in the list. You cannot locate the same version."

I looked around for this error and the solutions didn't seem to help. Tried removing the license file at C:\ProgramData\Unity\Unity_lic.ulf, which was already a Personal license. It was recreated as a Personal license.

I tried opening a scene file directly in the editor, and it shows the message that it's in a different project, do you want to open that project? Click Open and the scene file shows up for a second before the editor closes and the Hub appears, just as before.

I'm guessing the asset files have been flagged as created in Pro and so now it has locked me out of my own content? Even though I didn't actually use any Pro features and shouldn't have bought it in the first place (yes I'm a dumbass).

Can anyone help? This really sucks, months of work down the drain...

 

I don't think the pro/personal is the issue.

Some steps to try:

1. back your project up COMPLETELY (ideally use source control always!!)

2. inside the project next to the Assets, Packages and ProjectSettings folders, there may be some other folders. If you see a Temp folder, delete it, and retry.

3. If that doesn't work, in the same location (next to Assets/ProjectSettings), if you see a Library folder, delete it and retry opening Unity.

ALSO: get the same version of Unity you originally used, or later. Unity does not support going backwards.

You can find the version in the ProjectSettings/ProjectVersion.txt file

 

Hi thanks for the reply. Unfortunately these didn't seem to help. I deleted the Temp directory then the Library directory. Also verified that the version in ProjectSettings is 2019.4.1f1 (e6c045e14e4e) which is the version that's installed (this is the same machine I last worked on the project on originally).

Weirdly I now can't open the new project I created yesterday either, same symptom of the hub disappearing then coming back with an error shown for less than a second.

 

Well at least you know it's not your project. I guess the usual fail-software steps: uninstall, reinstall, relicense, etc.

 

Thanks for the help -- reinstalling fixed the issue. Wish I knew why it happened, hopefully it won't happen again...